More Dynamic Range in GIMP

Exposure blend is a GIMP plugin which facilitates the process of creating contrast blended exposures. Contrast blending is a popular technique for getting more dynamic range from a set of bracketed images.

(Photoshop users might wanna check here for a few actions and a tutorial.)

Gimp Development Branch

GIMP's development team, has announced the 2.5 development branch. It's no where near stable yet, but what it means is that we will soon have a Gimp that can support higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing—things many have criticized the GIMP for over the years.

Like I said, this is just a development branch, so it's really for nothing more than taking a peek into the future. Those who'd like to try GIMP, or find out more should take a look at their latest stable release GIMP 2.4

Gimp users who are also Flickr users will like GimpPublishr because it cuts down on an important step in your workflow. GimpPublishr supports exporting photos to Flickr and to Picassaweb.

Gimp 2.4 Released

The Gimp has reached a version 2.4 release.

Developers, artists and user interface designers from all over the world worked together to make GIMP more powerful and easier to use than ever. The changes from version 2.2 are too numerous to list here, please check the Release Notes to get an overview.

This is exciting news, and with it comes a new look for their website, which looks really good. Thanks Gimp Team! So, if you're a user, it's time to upgrade.

Two links in a row about The Gimp; it's obviously a Gimp news day.

In Photos.org has posted a Gimp plugin to simulate a Lomo. I played around with it a bit and it's pretty neat.

The Gimp and HDR

It seems that there are lots of people that don't understand that The Gimp is not capable of doing HDR images. There is a simple reason for this, which involves the way The Gimp represents image files. Without being too technical, I'll try to explain.

The Gimp's basic model represents each pixel as 3 different numbers between 0 and 255. This means that it can represent only 16581375 different colors per pixel. I say only, because, if you were to use 3 floating point numbers, from 0 to 1, or 3 numbers from 0 to 65535, or some other power of 2 (minus 1), you then are able to represent many more colors; you become able to represent a higher dynamic range of colors.

Even if The Gimp supported more pixel values, our monitors can't, and we need to use a process like tone mapping to convert the computed HDR image (comprised of some combination of multiple exposures), back into something viewable; something where the range of pixels is made up of 3 integers from 0 to 255 (in the general case).

This doesn't mean The Gimp sucks, because it certainly doesn't; it just means that it has some limitations and one has to be mindful of them. This "problem" of image representation is only really visible if you're looking for ultra-high quality output, like movie producers, and most photo professionals. Amateurs need not worry.

Fauxto

Finding Fauxto this morning was a bit of a shock. I'm not one for this whole revolutionary phase where we put huge applications online and use them over the web, especially a real image editor like Photoshop or The Gimp. I'm also not a huge fan of things written in Flash, and Fauxto is that as well.

Though it's in it's beta form, the early release of Fauxto is pretty impressive. It looks and acts like a real image editor. It's definitely one of the most impressive Flash apps I've seen in recent history. Check it out. Also be sure to check out there blog.

Gimp Tutorials

Assuming you don't know what GIMP is, you'll probably be less interested in these tutorials. Though, if you want a FREE and awesome replacement for Photoshop, then you should go back and find out about GIMP, and while you're at it take a look at that list of tutorials to get you started.